For only the
13th time in its history, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
prepared last week to pass its mantle of leadership to a new
president−although not to a new generation. As mourners filled the Mormon
Tabernacle in Salt Lake City to bid farewell to Ezra Taft Benson, who died
at the age of 94, there was no sign of turmoil and little suspense over who
would be the next official "prophet, seer and revelator" of the 8.7-million
member Mormon Church. Next in line for the post is Howard W. Hunter, 86, a
former corporate attorney and the most senior member of the church's Council
of the Twelve Apostles.

Yet concern over
Hunter's age and health is prompting some church members to wonder aloud
whether the gerontocracy at the top of the Mormon hierarchy is leading the
church into troubled theological waters. Benson bad been in failing health
for some time and, according to insiders, had spent his last years under
24-hour care, unable to speak or perform most official duties. The
incoming leader has already suffered a heart attack and a crippling
nervous disorder. "Mormons believe God runs the church and that the
president is his voice," says Elbert Peck, editor of the independent Mormon
journal Sunstone. "What are we to believe when his voice is
incapacitated?"

The Mormons are not alone in
this dilemma. It is a concern shared by other religious groups that have
built gerontocracy into their laws only to find mortality encroaching on
faith in divinely anointed leaders.

Nearly a continent away from
Utah, the 92-year-old Lubavitcher Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, spiritual
leader of a worldwide movement of Hasidic Jews, lies near death in a
Brooklyn, N.Y., hospital room. His failing health poses a profound
challenge to the hopes of his devoted followers, many of whom are convinced
he is their long-awaited messiah.

The ailing rabbi is the last
in a line of grand rebbes of Lubavitch, a movement that began in the 1700s
in what is now Belarus. As its spiritual and intellectual leader for more
than 40 years, Schneerson helped turn a small group of Holocaust survivors
into the largest Hasidic sect in the world. Since the mid-1970s, messianic
speculation among his followers has focused increasingly on Schneerson
himself, even though the rabbi has never publicly claimed the title. They
have waged an international publicity campaign urging Jews to welcome Schneerson as their "King Moshiach," or messiah. Two strokes since 1992
have left him paralyzed and unable to speak.

Devoted followers must
sometimes perform intellectual acrobatics to deal with troubling
theological contradictions. Despite Schneerson's grave condition, for
example, his followers insist they do not even consider the possibility
of his death. "We refuse to accept that notion," says Rabbi Yehudah
Krinsky, spokesman for the group. Alternatively, says Zatman Shmotkin,
another Lubavitch spokesman, whether or not Schneerson is the messiah,
"we believe he will be with us until the moshiach comes. Then everyone
lives forever."

While Schneerson's death
might be unfathomable to his followers, Jewish leaders outside the
movement are seriously weighing the repercussions. Some worry that the
rabbi's death will cause such anguish among his followers that many will
require psychological care. Others suggest it will set off a
theological debate that could easily split the movement. Allan Nadler,
research director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in
Manhattan, suggests some Lubavitchers will argue that Schneerson was "a
potential messiah, and that he didn't declare himself because the
world wasn't ready." Others might insist that the rabbi was indeed the
messiah and "develop their own theology of a second coming or a
resurrection."

Along the watchtower. Yet another
crisis of theological proportions looms for the Jehovah's Witnesses, an
American-born millennialist sect known for its fervent door-to-door
preaching. Its governing body-now down to just 11 men, all in their
70s and 80s- is part of a dwindling generation that according to the
faith's teaching will live to see the apocalyptic "end of the age." As
time continues to thin the leadership ranks of the 4.4 million-member
denomination, scholars say they expect to see shifts in official
teachings and reinterpretations of its end-of-the-world prophecies.

Officially known as the
Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, the Jehovah's Witnesses was founded
in Pennsylvania in 1872 by a disillusioned Presbyterian named Charles
Taze Russell. Based on complex biblical calculations, Russell predicted
the second coming of Jesus Christ would occur in 1914 and that 144,000
witnesses, mentioned in the Book of Revelation, would be called to reign
in heaven as "kings and priests" over a new Kingdom of God on Earth.
Many others would be saved and live forever in the earthly kingdom.

But when 1914 passed, it
was explained that Christ had returned invisibly and had begun a
countdown to the end of the world. Pointing to a passage in the gospel
of Matthew, the group's leaders declared that the generation alive in
1914 would "not pass away" before the end events occurred. Merton
Campbell, a spokesman for the Watchtower Society, says he "wouldn't
want to speculate" on what will happen if that generation dies out. But
with that generation now in its 80s, further reinterpretations are all
but certain. "They'll have to make some kind of change," says Raymond
Franz, a former governing-board member. "It's becoming absolutely
untenable."

Whatever the change, it
will take some adjustment and may cause confusion and even
discouragement among some of the faithful. But as the Mormons, the
Lubavitchers and others are discovering, coming to grips with mortality
is never easy−especially, perhaps, when it comes to the anointed. §